In the past decade, the way we shop has changed dramatically. Online shopping has leveled with physical shopping, even exceeding it in case of season or festive sale. All of this is attributed to the changing customer expectations, consisting of modern solutions like BOPIS, customized deals, EMI, BNPL, and so on.
The modern retailers need to offer a unified omnichannel experience across in-store and online channels. This means, offering consistent online experiences across web, web apps, mobile apps, social stores, retail outlets, and all the other applicable touchpoints. And the good news for retailers is that they can easily achieve this expected customer experience standards with futuristic and user-driven Adobe Digital Experience platform.
Retailers can fulfill this by improving customer experience across all channels throughout the buyer’s journey. With its AI capabilities, Adobe Experience Cloud makes retail personalization easier for brands. Let’s understand the state of personalization in retail and how Adobe Experience Cloud has managed to fill the gap with its tools.
The personalization gap in the retail industry
Despite personalization being the strategic goal for most organizations, only a few have come close to achieving it. The firms want to improve the level of maturity in digital and retail personalization at scale but have obstacles like fragmented data, lack of in-house resources, inability to increase ROI, difficulty scaling personalization across different channels, and failure to deliver experiences in real time.
Retailers now need to focus on a unified customer journey allowing real-time access to customer profiles and integrating data. To be well-positioned in the industries, organizations can improve the following things:
- A dedicated executive for personalization
- Clearly defined retail personalization strategy
- Continuous feedback
How Adobe Experience Cloud tools is personalizing retailers in-store and online experiences?
To meet unique needs and wants of customers the key is to incorporate delightful in-store and online shopping experiences. Adobe Experience Cloud tools empowers retailers to leverage personalisation in-store and online both:
#1. Easy payment options
Payment options play an important role in customer experiences, and brands should provide flexible, customer-oriented bill payment options. To deliver the best checkout to consumers, retailers accept popular payment methods, including debit cards, credit cards, PayPal, and Venmo. This enables retailers to get paid faster, reducing the risk of debts and adapting to dynamic customer expectations.
Buy Now Pay Later(BNPL) is also gaining a lot of popularity these days among Gen Z. Adobe Commerce has released a fully integrated payment solution that lets customers securely pay and manage order data from every storefront. Adobe’s payment services are a single solution that enables you to process payments, view reports or analytics, and get notified. It helps you reach new customers by accepting payments in local currencies.
#2. Flexibility in returns and pick-up with physical stores
90% of customers want an easy-to-return feature when purchasing. If the retailer asks for a fee to return, users are most likely to buy from another store. Customers also want nearby store locations to have the return goods option. Customer expectations of delivery and shipment costs have also shifted, as most want same-day delivery and low shipment costs. To handle this challenge, savvy retailers offer BOPIS (Buy Online, Pickup in store) for customer convenience.
Users often search for products from retailers that offer BOPIS before purchasing. With ‘Store Fulfillment’ by Adobe Commerce, merchants with warehouses and physical stores have an advanced solution that lets you deliver enhancing BOPIS or curbside experiences. Store Fulfillment provides omnichannel flexibility, productivity of store employees, improves inventory management, and mobile-enabled BOPIS solution to deliver a seamless experience.
#3. AI-powered Live Search
Retailers with in-store and online business benefit extremely well when they deliver fast, relevant and personalized search results which keeps customers engaged and makes them purchase. Many shoppers navigate by using keywords or categories looking for relevant results. Adobe Commerce Live Search changes it all by AI and machine learning providing quicker and personalized results through search-as-you-type results. Live Search reduces manual tasks for merchants while delivering fast and accurate search results. From a shoppers perspective, it saves time browsing the entire catalog. Retailers can also make users visit their website in-store for an engaging shopping experience.
#4. Increased demand for personalization
Customers want personalized offers, whether shopping in-store or online, as per individual habits. And customers who receive personalized recommendations are likely to buy more than planned. Retailers can make the most of tailored suggestions or promotions during shopping. At this time, retailers are looking for AI-driven product recommendations to conduct meaningful conversations with every visitor. With Adobe Target, you can achieve the ultimate goal of delivering relevant, timely offers that align with customers’ needs. Adobe Target can provide personalization by visually creating and managing A/B testing.
#5. Mobile-enhanced experiences
Though many people use laptops for online shopping, 79% of sales came via smartphones. From buying groceries to ordering dinner users have shifted their habits of buying online leading brands to think about customer experiences. To deliver seamless customer journey experiences a new application built on Adobe digital Experience platform – Adobe Journey Optimizer is launched. With Journey optimizer brands are allowed to send personalized mobile messages via push notifications, or location-based triggers. For example, retailers can notify on which store they have availability of products of shoppers’ choices. Merchants can reach the right audience on the right channel at crucial times when users need personalization the most.
#6. Adobe Experience Manager for engaging content experiences
A CMS like Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) can help you create and personalize content at scale. With automated tools and workflow framework brands can increase engagement at every touchpoint of customer journey. Adobe Experience Manager personalization simplifies relevant data sources in real time to make it widely accessible in the organization. From browse to buy, AEM ensures to deliver engaging CX to drive conversions. Whether it is creating, managing, or delivering content and digital assets across multiple channels seamlessly, AEM ensures personalization at scale.
#7. Adobe Marketo Engage for marketing automation
More than 50% of online shoppers expect a billing receipt email after purchase. More than 40% want to receive a text message when an order has shipped. The rising expectations of users lead to making every interaction the right one. Consumers want to feel every interaction to be personal with the brand. With the help of Adobe Marketo’s machine learning and predictive analytics capabilities, retailers can automate these interactions to ensure consistent personalization on different channels. In fact, you can automate entire customer journeys with Adobe Marketo across touchpoints to deliver relevant and interactive messages.
Leveraging the Adobe Digital Experience platform
While online shopping makes the buying process easier, physical stores provide instant products, with the ability to touch and feel the product. Customers feel more comfortable when they research, browse, compare prices, interact with sales representatives, and checkout without bugs. In the future we will see the co-existence of online and retail experiences. Through Adobe Experience Cloud platform, brands can deliver tailor made offers to individual customers with some in-store tactics and thrive in the world of digital commerce.
